Slide Sentinel: Designing Remote Sensor Systems to Estimate Landslide
Potential in Oregon Landscapes
Abstract
A system capable of reliably detecting catastrophic landslides and
centimeter movement in land mass could save lives and offers landowners
valuable information about gradual changes in soil displacement on their
land. With precise acceleration and relative positioning data collected
from an accelerometer and a set of GPS receivers, a system can be
designed to detect subtle changes in sensor position due to land
movement. With the rapid production of new microprocessors and greater
memory storage capabilities the limits of microcontroller systems are
continually expanding. The Slide Sentinel project offers landowners a
low-cost alternative to commercial equipment consisting of a network of
remote low power sensors that detect fast linear slides and eventually
lower soil movements such as creep. Long range low-power (LoRa) radio
connections on these sensor nodes wirelessly transmit three-dimensional
acceleration, Real Time Kinematic (RTK) GPS coordinates, and sudden
shift alerts to a common base station where they are exported to an
online spreadsheet to be processed remotely.